by Owen Lipstein and Amanda Schmidt July/August 2009
We’ve done hundreds of interviews over the past years, and in the course of what we believe is judicious editing, hundreds of thousands of words have fallen on the floor. In our history, there have been only two that we’re run nearly every letter of, not because we couldn’t cut them, but because we couldn’t bear to let those words fall like seeds onto stone. Both fought hard for their wisdom. Both spread it through story. Both have moved a nation. One was Maya Angelou. The other is this one.
From strumming his banjo as an enlisted man during World War II, to refusing to plead the Fifth during his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, to popularizing “We Shall Overcome,” to co-founding Clearwater back in 1966, Pete Seeger continues to do everything he can to provoke, educate and move multiple generations with his songs. Whether he’s at Madison Square Garden, or an elementary school in Beacon, Pete Seeger makes a difference.
As an artist, as a community member, as the guy who shows up to play his banjo on its banks—no single person has done more for our Hudson River. (At least no one since 1609.)
Pete Seeger: What can I tell you that you don’t know already?
Owen Lipstein: We know very little, actually. But we’d like to know what we can learn from looking at the river every day. What do you learn?
PS: I see how things are connected. The Hudson is an arm of the ocean, you know. And people have come here from all over the world.
First, I guess you know that there were two separate migrations over the Bering Sea. One was about 15,000 years ago, and [those people] went down the West Coast all the way to South America. But 12,000 years ago, another small group came over. They peeled out through North America, but they didn’t go into Central or South America. And I think they’re not sure exactly how many got to the Hudson how many thousand years ago. But I think they’ve got archeological records from at least 4000 years ago. At that time, only the Haudenosaunee—we call them the Iroquois—had any kind of government.
Listen, some day you’ve got to have a story about the Haudenosaunee system of government. Because it’s a very dramatic story. It’s like Jesus.
OL: Will you tell us?
PS: A young man paddled out of Lake Ontario, went to a village and said, “There’s going to be a great peace.” Because the six nations were just having one war after another. They spoke the same language, more or less. But there was fighting even within villages. The shamans would say, “Oh, this man has put the evil eye on you. You must kill a member of his clan.”
Anyway, [this young man] goes from village to village and says, “There will be a great peace.” And he sketched out a plan. Women, who were the heads of the clans, voted on which men would meet. Once a year, they would meet in the long house, under the great tree of peace, with the white roots of peace reaching at all four points of the compass, and they would decide how to settle arguments between them. There would be no fighting.
This happened about 500 years ago. Two hundred and fifty years later an Irish fur trader married an Indian, the daughter of a chief. He sent Benjamin Franklin a long letter explaining the Haudenoshaunee method of government—or at least of keeping the peace. Thirty years later, Ben Franklin’s at the Constitutional Convention, and the Convention had almost broken up because the Hamiltonians and the Southerners couldn’t come to an agreement with the Jeffersonians and the working class ones. Ben Franklin knew that if they couldn’t get these 13 colonies together, it was only a matter of time before the king would take over again, and there’d be fighting.
So he said, “Let me read you this description of the system of government of people we call savages, because their ways are different from ours. But they have been able to keep the peace. Who can say that 13 English colonies can’t learn to do it?” So he reads this letter, and sure enough, they got together and finally worked out the idea of having two houses of Congress. One the Senate, which the Hamiltonians and the Southern slave-owners liked, and the other, the House of Representatives, which the others liked.
Well, that’s a long digression. Except the history is a little upstate. But, the Hudson Valley’s certainly fascinating because of all the different people here.
OL: How does all of the appreciation that you’re getting at this stage in your life affect you?
PS: Well, frankly, it’s the most difficult period I’ve ever had. My wife and I led a halfway normal life for the last 60 years, since we’ve been in Beacon. Now, I’ve gotten too much publicity, and the mail comes in by the bushel, and the phone rings every five minutes. And I have to hire somebody to help us send out form letters, where I say, “I’m sorry I can’t write you a longer letter. I don’t have time to listen to your CD. I don’t have time to read your book. I can’t come and accept an award,” and so on and so on. It’s not easy, to say the least. But I hope I’ll survive it for at least a year or two, because I’m fascinated with what’s going on. I should tell you my mantra.
OL: Please.
PS: The agricultural revolution took thousands of years. The industrial revolution took hundreds of years. But the information revolution is only taking decades. And if we use it, and use the brains God gave us, who knows what miracles may happen in the next few years. Well, one miracle happened last November.
OL: You couldn’t be more right about that. Does all of this attention, all of this publicity, all of these honors—all of us wanting more from you than you can give—does it distance you from that person who is the artist, and the activist, and the husband, and all of the other things that you are?
PS: Well, things are difficult. But my wife and I are very fortunate to have a little house on a hill, with a beautiful view of the river. We’ve been here exactly 60 years this month.
There was a small cliff, and some land, which was very steep. The real estate agent hadn’t been able to sell it. People said, “Well, I can’t build on land this steep.” But I climbed up the little cliff, and saw that it leveled off for half an acre. And I’d been to a school where I learned to use an axe, so at the end I had 70 straight, mostly oak trees, chopped down. With help, we had a foundation dug, with stones—very amateurishly—pasted together around the base. One of my hobbies is stone masonry.
OL: Really?
PS: I call it the folk art of masonry. It was killed by the invention of Portland cement.
OL: I think Portland cement is one of our great enemies.
PS: [Laughter] Yes. Now you can paste any stone in any position. Before, you had to lay them in level courses, and you slanted the top of each rock slightly to the outside of the wall, so that if wind should blow rainwater into a vertical crack, it would drip down and hit the top of the rock underneath it, and then flow to the outside, rather than getting trapped inside the wall, and freezing and breaking the wall up.
That’s a digression also. You might say I think the arts will very possibly go down in history as saving the human race. I’m thinking of all the arts, including the art of cooking. And I include sports: Joe DiMaggio leaping for a fly ball is as great as any ballet dancer. These things can all leap over barriers of religion, and barriers of language and ethnic rivalries, and so on.
I’m very glad you’re having an issue on the arts, which often gets put in a corner by people who like to think of Art with a capital A, and anything else is not really art. [Laughter] Musicians who say, “Well, now, Bach and Beethoven. That’s music. And all the rest is just trash.”
OL: There’s something incredibly healthy about building a good stone wall. With great affection, you spoke of the art and science of dry masonry the mastery of old time skills that are easily forgotten.
PS: I think it’s fascinating that in this machine age, handcrafting of various sorts has not died—whether it’s needlework, people making patchwork quilts, or even spinning, and people making threads or garments. Gardening is coming back with a rush. There are probably more than 800 community gardens in New York City now. An umbrella organization called The Green Guerillas got rules passed by the Parks Department, so that if you get a number and a name and perhaps a fence, you will not get bulldozed. Otherwise, your garden improves the neighborhood, and it’s only a matter of a few decades before a developer says, “Hey, I can make some money there. Bulldoze that garden, and we’ll put up a high rise.”
Incidentally, is Amanda there?
Amanda Schmidt: Right here, Pete.
PS: Because I think you should be asking some questions, too. If there’s a world here, it may be women that save us.
AS: I hear that you have a new book coming out.
PS: Yes. My book of songs will be out in the fall. It came out 15 years ago, but was so full of mistakes—some of them very big mistakes—that I told the little publisher, little Sing Out magazine, “Don’t reprint it. I’ll revise it, correct it.” Finally—it took me ten years or more—this spring, the final corrections were made. W.W. Norton Publishers is going to be the co-publisher now, and it will be officially off the press in November. It’s called, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Sing-Along Memoir.”
AS: In so many ways, when people—at least in my generation—think of art and the river, we think of you. As an artist, and a father of the movement to protect the Hudson, how have you watched art and the river affect one another?
PS: I could see how pictures of the Hudson affected people in Europe, as well as here—this astonishing combination of cliffs and farmland and waterfalls. Writers took advantage of it, whether it was Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper or others, like how the Mississippi got written up by Mark Twain. Rivers were highways in the old days, so rivers have been important always, in bringing people together. I’d say the arts, though, whether it’s architecture or music or painting—or even sculpture —they’re all very much part of the picture.
It’s almost amusing that an occasional, unusual artist will actually get things together, like the Storm King Art Museum, where they have a lot of sculpture. Or Dia, in Beacon. Have you ever seen Dia?
OL: Yes.
PS: I have to laugh. Being in a room about 50 by 60 feet, with rectangles around the wall, all of a different shade of white. Bluish white, greenish white, yellowish white, pinkish white. Purplish white. [Laughter]
The one piece of art which I hope they never take away is where a person cut strips of brightly-colored metal, and they start from the floor, and go up 11 feet, and then stop. They spread out as they get up, go higher. I call it an upside-down waterfall.
OL: You wrote in a letter to us that you’re a magazine-a-holic. Why?
PS: Lifelong, I’ve been a magazine-a-holic. I remember that my grandfather had a bookshelf of Harper’s Weekly—probably from the late 19th century—that was about five feet long.
I read radical magazines and conservative magazines that dip into this, and dip into that. Some I drift out of, because they don’t have too many long articles. It’s a rare one that I like that doesn’t have illustrations. I like pictures in magazines, as well as writing.
I don’t mind a magazine having a very frank opinion. So it’s kind of interesting to read The Wall Street Journalor Forbes or lots of things. I read Life and Look years ago. Now, of course, all publishing is in trouble, as the Internet is crowding them financially.
I actually wanted to be a newspaperman, myself, because I ran the school newspapers from age 12 to age 18, in three different places. But the Depression was on when I dropped out of college, and I failed utterly to get even a hint of a job. Meanwhile, I had an aunt who taught school. And she said, “Peter, come sing some of your songs for my class. I can get $5 for you.” It seemed like stealing. Most people had to work all day to get $5, sometimes two days. There, I got it for having fun for an hour. Pretty soon I was singing at another school, and another. In the summer, I was singing at camps. And quit looking for an honest job.
Well, I urge you, even though your circulation may go very slowly, keep on reaching people with truths of this and that. And be very strict about your editing. You know what Dr. Seuss says. “If you want to use your words to carry great strength, use them with shorth.” [Laughter] “Shorth is better than length.”
I look forward to the next few issues, as long as I’m living.
AS: Pete, you’ve been involved in so many extraordinary events over a long and prolific career. If there’s anything that you could tell us you’ve learned, what would that be?
PS: The same thing many other people said. Don’t give up. Persevere. If you think it’s a good idea, stick with it. Calvin Coolidge wrote it down, and said, “Don’t think you have to be a genius. What you have to be is persevering.” And—who knows. Who knows?
I look upon myself as a sower of seeds. You know the famous parable? It’s in all Gospels except John, about the scatterer of seeds in the field. Some fall in the pathways and get stepped on. They don’t grow. Some fall on stones. They don’t even sprout. Some fall on fallow ground, and grow and multiply a hundredfold.
